Senior Bowl QBs target draft boost
Tyson Bagent and Max Duggan have turned the page on terrific seasons that ended badly with national championships in sight.
Both have been working to improve their NFL draft stock during a weeklong audition in Mobile, Alabama, that wraps up with Saturday’s Senior Bowl. They are among a group of quarterbacks all trying to work their way into the second day of the April draft even if none are first-round prospects.
It’s a new beginning for two players who had disappointing finishes to their college careers. Duggan, who was second in Heisman Trophy voting, was on the wrong end of a blowout as TCU lost 65-7 to Georgia in the College Football Playoff final last month.
Bagent won the Harlon Hill Trophy — Division II’s equivalent of the Heisman — in 2021 and was an All-American that year and this past fall for Shepherd University in his home state of West Virginia. But the Rams lost 44-13 to Colorado School of Mines in the D-II semifinals in December, their second straight season reaching the final four before taking a lopsided loss.
At the Senior Bowl, Bagent and Duggan both will be on the American team, along with quarterback Clayton Tune, who played at Houston. The National team is led by quarterbacks Malik Cunningham (Louisville), Jake Haener (Fresno State) and Jaren Hall (BYU), who is perhaps the top quarterback prospect playing in the game. Tennessee’s Hendon Hooker was on hand observing practices and meeting with teams but is recovering from a torn ACL.
Kenny Pickett took part in last year’s Senior Bowl before becoming the only quarterback taken in the opening round of the 2022 draft, going from the University of Pittsburgh to the Pittsburgh Steelers.
The National roster also includes former University of Tennessee at Chattanooga offensive lineman McClendon Curtis.
Duggan started 43 games in his TCU career. That experience and his program-wide impact on the Horned Frogs led Senior Bowl executive director Jim Nagy to compare him to two quarterbacks from last year’s event: Brock Purdy of Iowa State, who was the final pick of the draft but helped the San Francisco 49ers on a run that ended in the NFC title game last weekend, and Desmond Ridder of Cincinnati, a third-round pick by the Atlanta Falcons who started their final four games of a 7-10 season.
“I know when I got into scouting, we used to value experience a ton at quarterback,” said Nagy, a former NFL scout. “And guys that lifted programs. That’s why I loved Desmond . ... Max has played a ton of football, so anyone that’s going back and doing a Purdy study, they’re going to look at Max and see he started 40-whatever career games, that can certainly help him.”
Nagy said Duggan jumped from being projected as a seventh-round pick or free agent after the 2021 season to somewhere in the range of the fourth or fifth round this spring.
Bagent, meanwhile, is finally getting his shot to prove he can play against Division I competition. He set the NCAA’s alldivision record with 159 career touchdown passes while finishing with 17,034 yards.
“I knew that because I played at a small school, in order to check a lot of the boxes that a lot of the scouts had for me, being able to come here and play against top talent and show that I’m right where I’m supposed to be is huge in this process for me,” Bagent said.
He has drawn more interest from NFL teams probably than he did from college programs coming out of high school, when his only other offers were from Robert Morris and the University of Albany, which compete in the lower level of Division football, the Championship Subdivision. Bagent entered the transfer portal last January and visited two Bowl Subdivision programs — West Virginia and Maryland — before opting to stay put.